An Interview with Ken Albala
Donald A. Yerxa:
You note that there are two distinct approaches to the study of past foodways: food history and culinary history. In which camp are you?
Ken Albala:
Unusually, I put myself right in the middle with a foot firmly planted on both sides.
Yerxa:
Why is that unusual?
Albala:
Academic food historians usually don’t cook things, and the people who are very interested in cooking don’t have the time, skills, or the desire to do the kinds of research that academics do. Also, they are not interested in the same kinds of questions. Culinary historians are interested first and foremost in the actual recipes and what the food tastes like. And that’s something that academic historians don’t have any interest in. They are interested in issues of gender, class, or politics. Academic food historians look at cookbooks and other sources for issues of “bigger” historical importance.
I should say, however, that things are beginning to change. Historians are recognizing that what people ate and what they thought about what they ate should be treated like other aesthetic endeavors such as art or music. And if you want to know what people ate in the past, you need to cook from old recipes.
Let me give you an example from a workshop I conducted in Vermont this summer. There is an English recipe from the Good Huswives Treasurie (1588) for smearing a rabbit. The rabbit is cooked in a vessel called a pipkin, a ceramic vessel with three legs that sits on hot coals and is sealed with dough so that none of the moisture escapes. If you analyze this recipe, it makes no sense. There’s very little liquid in it. A whole rabbit is stuffed into a small vessel with onions, raisins, a little drop of verjus, and spices. It doesn’t seem possible that the rabbit would fit in a pipkin, and even if it did, you would think it would burn. In fact, if you were to cook this on a stovetop, it would burn. But I have learned that you have to follow the directions exactly and make no substitutions. This particular recipe required me to make a pipkin myself. (I have a pottery studio in my basement.) I didn’t realize at first that a pipkin is rounded on the bottom, and for good reason: it enables the heat to be distributed around the circumference of the pot and prevents cracking at the base. This explains why medieval cooking vessels often had rounded bottoms. After a few experiments, it came out magnificently. And this smeared rabbit confirmed my impression that you really can’t know what’s going on with a recipe unless you cook it as authentically as you possibly can. Keep in mind that species of animals are different now; vegetables are different. And it is impossible to know in every instance what people in the past were doing with their food. So you need to put in a lot of thought and be willing to experiment.
Dining cars on an American train, 1905. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-29464].
To get back to your original question, I’m trying to do both food and culinary history. I engage in the requisite historical research, but also do the cooking and eating. I have been teaching a course at Boston University this summer that combines these pursuits. A third of the class is devoted to a traditional history lecture; another third is devoted to analyzing historic recipes from an intellectual point of view; and in the final third we actually cook.
Yerxa:
There is so much interest in experiencing the past and exploring the extent to which that is even possible. It strikes me that the culinary approach to past foodways you are talking about is part of the same overall impulse that drives people to play music on period instruments or reenact Civil War battles.
Albala:
Indeed. It has always seemed strange to me that in, say, music it is perfectly legitimate for the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields to use period instruments and attempt to play music as it was in the past. But no one ever seems to talk about food history aesthetically. There is no special [End Page 8] vocabulary to describe it. Most food historians just look at the old recipes and comment on how weird they all are: How did they eat this?
Yerxa:
How did you get interested in food history?
Albala:
I started my research in nutritional theory, which is at the intersection of medicine and food. And I realized that my real interest was with food. Further, I have shifted from the more intellectual topics of food history to more hands-on topics: what was being written in cookbooks, what was the aesthetic, and what does all this tell you about different historical eras. I think this is a good lens through which to look at history. Eating food just happens to be one of those things that everyone does. Food is a good way to analyze people across time and across cultures. How people think about food usually involves some sort of ideological bent. People eat a certain way because they want to stay healthy, or they want to fast as a form of penitence. The ways people construct the universe are expressed through what we eat and won’t eat. Eating tells us so much about who people are—politically, socially, culturally. Not eating meat can be a function of not liking the taste or not wanting to kill animals. But usually it runs a lot deeper than that and signals a rejection of mainstream culture or some other expansive notion.
Yerxa:
What are some of your current projects?
Albala:
I’ve just finished a co-authored cookbook with Penguin, which was a lot of fun. I’m not sure what the title will be, but probably something like The Lost Art of Real Cooking. It includes a lot of recipes that people just don’t think of making any-more—things that are dangerous, difficult, or very time-consuming.
Yerxa:
Such as?
Albala:
Making bread with wild yeast. Curing salami at home. Making cheese or your own pickles and sauerkraut. Things like that; in fact, many of the things we do in my class this summer, where we use cooking techniques that have disappeared because of industrialization and food safety laws.
Another project is a four-volume encyclopedia of food cultures around the world. There are about 120 contributors lined up for this. My longer-range project is a book on fasting in the Reformation era. I’ve been working on this for two or three years now. Perhaps I’ll entitle it Food Fights of the Reformation [laughing]. But there were real fights across confessional lines. Some believed that the fast must remain exactly as it had always been: Fridays and Saturdays, all of Lent, saints’ days, and so forth. About 150 days of the year were fast days. This meant that there was no food until sundown and no meat or dairy products. Many new Protestant sects did away with a lot of this. Some believed that there was no biblical warrant for such extensive fasting; others believed that fasting had become overly ritualistic and legalistic and should be linked instead to penitence and soul searching. I’ve come to the conclusion that fasting was a lot more central to the Reformation than historians realize. Scriptural, Eucharistic, and church governance controversies and issues are central to historical accounts of the Reformation, but food is always left out. Yet the Swiss Reformation was prompted by a group of printers who ate sausages during Lent.
Illustration from Frederick Bishop, The Illustrated London Cookery Book (London, 1852).
Yerxa:
You maintain an active blog, Food Rant.
Albala:
It arose when a group of friends on the listserv maintained by the Association for the Study of Food and Society decided we would each start our own blogs. You can’t post pictures on listservs. It soon became a place where I could record the kinds of work I do—cooking old recipes and drafting entries for my cookbook—as well as one where I could try new things. So my food experiments and failures appear there. I confess that I find blogging to be very addictive and fun.
Yerxa:
How about the entry you posted on making a ham out of a bear leg?
Albala:
A good friend of mine knows a policeman who likes to hunt, but doesn’t like to eat all the animals he kills. From time to time my friend will get a deer and bring it to me to break down. One day a bear shows up. My next-door neighbor, who is a biologist, took the head. I took a leg, which I sawed off at the knee. I roasted the upper portion, which was delicious, and the rest I threw in the freezer until one day I was trying out recipes for ham and recalled that I had a bear’s leg in the freezer. And the bear’s leg ham became an entry on my blog.
Yerxa:
Has food history become mainstream in the historical profession?
Albala:
Food history is going mainstream and is gaining legitimacy in the profession. There are a lot more historians working on food and food-related topics. It is not uncommon for mid-career historians to ask me how they might start in food history. Even though there are only a handful of programs in the U.S. that grant degrees in food studies, the number of food history courses is rapidly expanding. It is a very viable subject for publishing. Even academic publishers are realizing that food titles sell. I get the sense that some historical fields have exhausted themselves. For example, the related field of agricultural history seems tired, whereas food history partakes of some of the same dynamics as cultural studies. It is very interdisciplinary: it draws from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and so on. To be a good food historian, you cannot think only like a historian. You have to go beyond the parameters of the discipline. [End Page 9]
